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From ecological partners, key technological breakthroughs to killer applications, they will determine the future of the multimedia ecosystem. Whoever can do better will control the future.
The unexpected COVID-19 in 2019 caused a rapid reshuffle of the multimedia technology ecosystem, and the Matthew effect became more apparent. Scenes such as online education, video conferencing, games, long and short videos have achieved considerable growth during the epidemic. In the future, as the epidemic becomes normal, 5G is gradually popularized and the mobile Internet dividend is gradually disappearing. Who will take more initiative in the future multimedia ecosystem? This will depend on three aspects: ecological partners, key technological breakthroughs and killer applications.
Ecological partner
Ecological partners determine the scale of the multimedia ecosystem. The more partners, the richer the ecosystem will be. I divide ecological partners into two categories, one is developers who focus on technology, and the other is partners who master industry core resources. The former is a broad developer, including individuals, students, ISVs and suppliers. The latter has more and deeper industry resources and understanding. Although more and more companies choose to support their business through cloud platforms, in traditional IT, the proportion of cloud services is still very small, and its potential is huge.
Take Tencent as an example. Relying on platform-level services such as WeChat, mini programs, video accounts, and QQ, Tencent Video Cloud can reach users most directly. The huge number of users and high-frequency usage rate provide new products and new experiences. An environment for incubation, testing and evolution. WeChat is also considered to be the third-largest operating system of the mobile Internet, on par with Android and iOS. At the beginning of 2018, the mini program opened the live broadcast function, which greatly reduced the technical threshold of live broadcast. This year, many educational institutions quickly transformed from offline to online through mini program live broadcast. Compared with 2018, Mini Program Live provides richer technical capabilities, ranging from traditional RTMP to RTC linking microphones and full coverage of fast live broadcasts supporting WebRTC on the uplink and downlink, providing capabilities for various live broadcast scenarios. One more thing, the RTC link-to-microphone service provided by Tencent is called TRTC. It supports standard WebRTC uplink and downlink low-latency live broadcast is called fast live broadcast. In addition to being able to access through small programs, it can also be accessed through SDK and web.
In addition, students who have followed WeChat recently discovered that Tencent has begun testing video account live broadcasts. Moments of friends based on pictures, texts and short videos, go to video account, and then to video account live broadcast, step by step to provide more functions. It is understood that the technology behind the video account is also the LVB and fast live broadcast products of TRTC and Tencent Cloud Video Cloud. Another thing worth paying attention to is the WeChat group live broadcast, which is said to be grayscale to a very small number of users, especially for groups in some education fields.
Relying on national-level applications such as WeChat, combined with Tencent's powerful audio and video capabilities, you really want to do anything, this is the power of ecology.
Key technology breakthrough
Multimedia applications have extremely high requirements for experience. Behind this is a complex technical chain, which will affect the user experience if any link is not done well. From this perspective, if we want to provide better services than our opponents, we must make a breakthrough in technology. There are two aspects here. First, there must be a clear technology development plan to attract more technology suppliers. Because of the interlocking multimedia technologies, it is easy to obtain third-party technical capabilities through standard interfaces. As platforms like Huawei and Tencent, you don’t need to do any technology yourself. Secondly, there must be demonstrable technology. Whether through self-research or acquisition, some technologies need to be turned into superior technologies. Especially for some key technologies, these big factories are all working hard on their own research, including video codec, network transmission optimization technology, etc. For example, the encoder V265, which achieved two objective scores in the MSU Encoder Contest last year, is one of Tencent's key technologies. To provide high-quality video content, the encoder plays a key role, which directly affects subjective quality and cost. Another example is the TRTC mentioned repeatedly above-Tencent's RTC transmission technology. In the context of the increasing demand for delay, it is inevitable to have your own RTC technology. Only in this way can the ultimate optimization be achieved and support for each access terminal quickly. But this also puts forward extremely high requirements for TRTC's scalability and availability. To deploy and stably operate a TRTC network globally will face huge challenges.
Whether Ali, Tencent or Huawei, they have invested heavily in multimedia technology, trying to obtain more advantageous technologies. Behind this is actually a deeper level of competition, namely talents and standards.
An experienced technical person may be one enemy to one hundred. Therefore, the competition for high-end technical talents has already entered a white-hot stage. The benefits provided by domestic companies have long exceeded those provided by overseas leading companies. The battle for standards can also be seen as a battle for extreme talents. Even rising stars like OPPO, ByteDance, and Kuaishou have begun to invest in standards, not to mention giants like Tencent, Ali, and Huawei.
Killer app
From Tencent conferences, small program live broadcasts, DingTalk to Welink, giants are all creating their own killer apps. As mentioned earlier, services such as WeChat applets are easy to obtain end users and can also give full play to the capabilities of the cloud platform. Whether each cloud platform can break through depends on the following two points: first, whether it can hold the existing killer application; second, whether it can find and intervene in the next killer application. In particular, looking for the next killer application is not only a must-see for big platforms, but also pursued by many innovative companies and capital. Entering an emerging market is much wiser than fighting with giants in the stock market.
For a giant like Tencent, it is best to enter the battlefield of killer applications in the first place. If not, you can indirectly benefit by providing the technical capabilities necessary for killer applications. For example, cloud gaming has gained extremely high exposure during the epidemic. Relying on its early technical layout in Codec, RTC transmission, and media processing, Tencent has taken a leading position. But in another key scenario-cloud editing services, Tencent originally hoped to quickly acquire capabilities through acquisitions, but it failed to make a move and had to catch up through self-research. However, due to the aforementioned V265 encoder, TRTC network, media editing and processing, and video understanding and analysis and other basic capabilities are outstanding, there is no special technical threshold for building cloud editing. Another example is the edge computing service related to 5G, which is considered an inevitable product of the 5G era, so each company has a huge layout. No matter what the killer application of 5G is, he cannot do without edge computing.
To sum up, if we want to make a breakthrough in the 5G era, we must take a multi-pronged approach in terms of ecology, technology and key products.
LiveVideoStackCon 2020 Beijing
October 31-November 1, 2020
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